LEAR, EDWARD (1812-1888), English artist and humor ist, was born in London on May 12, 1812. His earliest drawings were ornithological. When he was 20 years old he published a brilliantly coloured selection of the rarer Psittacidae. Its power attracted the attention of the 13th earl of Derby, who employed Lear to draw his Knowsley menagerie. He became a permanent favourite with the Stanley family, and Edward, 15th earl, was the child for whose amusement the first Book of Nonsense was composed. From birds Lear turned to landscape, his earlier efforts in which recall the manner of J. D. Harding; but he quickly acquired a more individual style. About 1837 he set up a studio at Rome, where he lived for ten years, with summer tours in Italy and Sicily, and occasional visits to England. During this period he began to publish his Illustrated Journals of a Land scape Painter: charmingly written reminiscences of wandering, which ultimately embraced Calabria, the Abruzzi, Albania, Cor sica, etc. From 1848-1849 he explored Greece, Constantinople, the Ionian Islands, Lower Egypt, the wildest recesses of Albania, and the desert of Sinai. He returned to London, but the climate did not suit him. In 1854-1855 he wintered on the Nile, and migrated successively to Corfu, Malta and Rome, finally building himself a villa at San Remo. From Corfu Lear visited Mount
Athos, Syria, Palestine and Petra; and when over 6o, by the assistance of Lord Northbrook, then Governor-General, he saw a large area of India.
The last task he set himself was to prepare for popular circula tion a set of some 200 drawings, illustrating from his travels the scenic touches of Tennyson's poetry ; but this he did not live to complete. He died at San Remo on Jan. 3o, 1888. Until sobered by age, his conversation was brimful of humorous fun. The paradoxical originality and ostentatiously uneducated draughts manship of his numerous nonsense books won him a more uni versal fame than his serious work. Ruskin placed the Book of Non sense first in the list of a hundred delectable volumes of contem porary literature.